The Moving Picture Weekly (1917-1919)

a THE MOVING PICTURE WEEKLY Her Face Is Your Fortune 1 0 head her own company, and make ~D.7 lVTorinrif I pictures featuring herself on a 13 J iVldlJuut regular schedule, might well be the goal of a picture actress; but it is a question whether many of these hardworking sisters would be willing to go through what Alice Howell has experienced in order to attain the honor. She is one of the hardest-working human beings in the world to-day, and she takes chances every <lay of her life, which would win for her a whole string of decorations — V. C.'s, D. S. O.'s, and crosses of war, and all the other rewards of reckless courage which are bestowed on the boys at the front. "That woman's got nerve enough to be a bomber in the front-line trenches," said an admirer of hers the other day, at the Broadway Theatre, New York, where one of her new Century Comedies, distributed by the Longacre Distributing Company, is running at the present time. It is called "Her Bareback Career," and is received three times a day with shrieks of laugher. Alice Howell scores deeply by her ability to combine pathos and humor. As a down-trodden, put-upon, abused slavey, which she portrays so often, she is absolutely pathetic, while at the same time she is immensely funny. Some of the most famous comedians of the stage, as well as of the screen, have gotten their effects in this way, but she is the only woman I can think of who manages the combination. If you can keep it up, it is a sure winner, but Alice Howell is one of the very few who can do so. "Oh, the poor creature!" you feel like exclaiming as she is bumped around by the proprietor, and the next minute you laugh all the harder for your pity of the moment before. She has a wistful, appealing expression of countenance all the time she is performing her absurd antics, and fit makes them register twice as well. There are very few women comedians, and especially few in slapstick ■comedy. Most of them could not stand the strain. And most would feel some natural repugnance to being black and blue all the time. Alice doesn't care. She is as indifferent to foruises and battering as if she were ■a. British tank in action. And yet she possesses one of the prettiest white skins you ever saw, and a complexion that does not need a grain of powder — it is so smooth and creamy. But she'll «top a pie in mid-career with her face, and she'll let herself be dragged all over a set by the beautiful blond hair ^of her head, if J. G. Blystone, her director, thinks that the picture requires it. Alice's hair is much too pretty to drag, too. It is a real, true gold, as fluffy as a baby's, and she has masses of it. "It's all in the day's work," is her motto, and she tells T-Iowqffl the interviewer, who asks for an exllUWdiu planation of her reckless indifference to rough treatment, that he'll have to use his imagination about her, as she is a modest creature and has never done anything interesting or sensational. Nothing interesting and nothing sensational— only risen to the position of head of her own company in little more than a year, only been dragged at the end of a rope, suspended from a baloon, through the clouds, only been thrown off the roof of a house, or dumped from an auto into the sea from the top of a cliff — and done all these things so that the audience forgets all about the danger to the woman in laughing at the comedienne. But she does not want to be featured as the "greatest laugh-maker of the age," "the biggest scream of the screen," "the funniest female of fancy," or anything like that. "Say that I like plenty of hard work, that I have a boundless ambition to make "ood, that I have a charming house which I love, that I am happily married, that I have the dearest dog in the world," she tells you. "But don't say that I'm the marvel of the age, or use any superlatives about me. I don't want any one but the public to do that. If they think I'm funny they'll laugh at my pictures and come back to see others. But if they don't like me, / saying that I am funny will never convince them — it will prejudice them against me." All this is sufficiently unusual, isn't it? Quite unique, in fact, but very typical of the woman, as her friends know her. "Her face is your fortune" is the slogan which has been adopted for Century Comedies, featuring Alice Howell, and it exactly describes the situation with regard to her pictures. "Coo-Coo"— the dearest dog in the world — and one of his mistress' most fervent admirers, looks up at her in approval and admiration from the bottom of page 35. Coo-Coo was Alice's companion in the days when she was glad to take a job of any kind she could get, the days when she was new to pictures, and had just left the vaudeville field, where she had achieved success as a comedienne and dancer. Illness in her family made a move to California imperative, and in those days Alice was often seen in the long line of those waiting for a chance to work, incognito, with any director who wanted the services of an extra woman who would take any chance, wear any eccentric make-up and did not care what she was given to do, so long as her pay check at the end of the day was forthcoming. She worked because she had (Continued on page 35)